Also in 2016, when asked why she articulated with the centrão, former president Dilma Rousseff stated that “governing without parties is flirting with authoritarianism”. But what about when party relations become so intrinsic to a government that it becomes difficult to identify who is who or where one party begins and another ends? This is the question that has been circling the minds of political scientists in Brazil at the moment. The Jair Bolsonaro government brought the Executive and the Legislative closer together as never seen before in the new Republic, and opened up a special category of relationships: those that only apply to the king’s friends. A kind of institutionalization of the bargain. And, as a good connoisseur of Congress, Bolsonaro and his peers from the center developed structures that, dressed up in constitutional legality, give a false sense of normality and allowed us not to put the pieces of a dangerous puzzle together.
And so, three years of government passed. The problem is that political structures are made by people. And people change sides. Especially when the wind of the election starts to go in another direction. In this way, some issues from the depths of government begin to surface. One of them was exposed by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo on Monday (18) to show that strange paths of projects, bids and financial resources pointed to the same place. THE
Company for the Development of the São Francisco and Parnaíba River Valleys (Codevasf).
According to the report, terms of the secret Budget were negotiated there. Tenders for tractors with prices that raised suspicions passed, and contracts were also closed with Engefort, a construction company that won 53 of the 99 bids it participated. And in order to meet this demand, which grew more than seven times between 2018 and 2020, the state-owned company needed more powers. Previously focused on investing in water resources and infrastructure works for a limited region, President Bolsonaro authorized, in 2020, that the state-owned company’s area of operation would pass to 15 states.
AMENDMENTS In 2021, according to data from the Transparency Portal, the state-owned company received R$3 billion from the federal government through parliamentary amendments. The problem is that the site does not detail where the resources went, nor which deputies allocated the funds. There is also no information on parties or data on how the bidding processes took place. And that was the missing piece of the puzzle. We knew about the secret Budget (and it was constitutional, as the Three Powers said). We also saw the center dominate the Palácio do Alvorada, even without government positions (until then, everything was normal). And there was a missing piece. Now there seems to be no more.
#MONEY